You need to get calories from somewhere, should it be from carbohydrate or fat?

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Palmitic acid: the horror never ends addendum

Okay, Victoria sent me the full pdf.

This group used 0.2mmol/l or 0.5mmol/l palmitate conjugated to bovine serum albumin. All other fatty acids were completely excluded. No semblance of physiological mixtures were involved.

But guess what, they had a living mouse model too!

Now you have to be wondering exactly how they managed to get a mouse to have 0.5mmol/l of palmitate in its bloodstream, to the exclusion of all other fatty acids, during a glucose tolerance test. After all, their test tube model used pure palmitate, surely they used the same conditions in their mice? This is a Nature paper after all.

How did they perform this near miracle? Well the methods section (when you finally find it tacked on to the end of the paper, an afterthought down beyond the references) doesn't mention any attempt to measure live mouse fatty acids at all. They didn't. WTF, this got published in Nature!

The diet used was good old commercial 5TJN. When I downloaded the composition pdf from the Test Diet website to my laptop it said I'd already downloaded it some time before..... It's popular!

Here's the link, it won't embed:

www.testdiet.com/PDF/5TJN.pdf

How much sugar would you like with your Crisco? Remember, always ask for your favourite lipotoxin by name...

NO NO NO.

JUST SAY NO.

Say no to Crisco.

As so often happens, this paper details feats of molecular and cellular manipulation of breathtaking complexity. How can anyone be capable of doing this and yet be so stupid? Awesome!

Peter

And it gets worse. The stats were done on "Prism 5.0 for Macintosh". OMG they're Mac users. It shouldn't be allowed. Their laptops should be confiscated forthwith. Now. I'll have them please.

My warning bells went off, too, when I read about the live mouse experiments embedded in the paper. So I contacted the authors and the first author sent me a PDF of the High Fat diet, and I gasped when I read how much Crisco was in the diet! And the other offenders in there are a real hoot, too. But, at least the diet might be a good enough approximation of the SAD high fat (and high carb) diet, though not a hyperlipid diet the good ol' paleo/primal way.

Linolenic acid is a n-3 fatty acid according to wikipedia,[1] but it is known that wikipedia is inferior to peer-reviewed journals and that it is an unreliable source.[2][3][4][5] Our conclusion is therefore that linolenic acid is not a n-3 fatty acid. Futhermore both the n-3 to n-6 ratio and the absolute amount of both omega fatty acids are well within physiological margins considered healthy.[6][7][8]

Ed, the formula of Crisco has varied hugely over the years. You can bet the Western Diet is formulated with the trans version, probably supplied from Axen and Axen's private stash of the 17% solution...

Tony, back when I was a Green Peace member I read a book on the hazards of industrial chemicals which eventually got to the level of quoting drowning statistics and yet WATER (gasp, horror) is piped to virtually every house in the land..... I exaggerate only slightly. As for oxygen toxicity, 100% will undoubtedly kill you, just more slowly than 0%.

...but then I was avoiding sat fats, eating whole meal bread and a ton of fruit in those days. Lentils, chick peas, pasta (wholemeal of course) and fresh squeezed orange juice with croissants and Nutella as a special treat. No wonder really.......

no, French have never banned trans-fats. What French legislation has banned since 1912 is oil with more the 5% linolenic acid because of their higher rancidity. You couldn't buy linseed oil for human consumption for instance.As European law has now precendence over French law, that ban has been lifted now for some years. The French Paradox can be simply explained by the fact that saturated fat isn't saturated fat (cognitive dissonance in fact) when it comes from traditional food.The worrying part is that the sat-fat phobia that starts to decline in the anglosphere has not reached its peak yet in francosphere.

As for the distinction between omega 3 and linolenic acid, I think they are right, they also distinguished between arachidonic and linoleic acid which are both omega6 fats. They used omega3 label to avoid to write eicosapentanoic and docosahexanoic acid the two main long chain o3 fats.

JorgeA, I'm just shocked that people this dim use Macs. They should be relegated to virally infected PCs running Windows 95 at best... Or maybe an abacus. They certainly should never be let near a Mac.

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!